Post navigation

About Stacey Schneider

Stacey Schneider has over 15 years of working with technology, with a focus on working with sales and marketing automation as well as internationalization. Schneider has held roles in services, engineering, products and was the former head of marketing and community for Hyperic before it was acquired by SpringSource and VMware. She is now working as a product marketing manager across the vFabric products at VMware, including supporting Hyperic. Prior to Hyperic, Schneider held various positions at CRM software pioneer Siebel Systems, including Group Director of Technology Product Marketing, a role for which her contributions awarded her a patent. Schneider received her BS in Economics with a focus in International Business from the Pennsylvania State University.

Plain and simple: Apache Hadoop has become the technology disrupter that is sending every enterprise into overdrive to get up to speed on and figure out how to exploit their data. Adoption is accelerating at 60% a year, yet 26% of the most sophisticated Hadoop users say that the time it takes to put Hadoop into production is gating its success.

From the agenda on this year’s Hadoop Summit in San Jose on June 26 & 27th, it looks like the industry is primed to fix this issue. This year, it is one of the first Hadoop/Big Data conferences that is supporting a full infrastructure track. VMware is also serious about this too, but we need your help—we need to meet you there!

Strategy Feedback Sessions

VMware’s big data experts, along with colleagues such as EMC’s Chuck Hollis, will be at the conference running a series of strategy feedback sessions concentrating on how extending virtualization will meet tomorrow’s requirements for big data analytics environments. We’d very much like to have you participate—and who knows, you may help shape the very future of Hadoop in big data web applications.

These 90 minute sessions will be run as small groups throughout the conference and will allow you to meet some of our top minds on how Hadoop will transform itself to seize the cloud. We’ll share with you some of what we see happening with a shift to make Hadoop more on-demand in the cloud, and some of our enabling technologies such as Serengeti and Hadoop Virtual Extensions (HVE). For your part of these sessions, we will concentrate on questions like: Continue reading →

The End of Life (EOL) process has begun for vFabric Enterprise Ready Server (ERS). The end of availability date is July 1, 2013, after which ERS will no longer be available for purchase. After this date, existing customers will be able to use their active deployments and will continue to benefit from support until their active subscription and support agreement (SnS) runs out. The end of general support (EOGS) date is July 1, 2014.

All ERS customers are encouraged to convert or deploy vFabric Web Server, the product that replaces the ERS bundle. Web Server has been integrated with the latest open source runtimes, security patches, and bug fixes, as well as adding new product features that better serve enterprise customers deploying applications across virtualized and cloud environments.

ERS customers with perpetual licenses and active support and subscription agreements (SnS) are entitled to a one-time $0 conversion to vFabric Web Server and open source Apache Tomcat Support. ERS customers with term licenses are eligible to convert to equivalent vFabric Web Server term licenses at the same price as ERS for HTTP term license and optionally add Apache Tomcat support or vFabric tc Server licenses.

Today, we are excited to welcome Cloudera officially to the VMware family. VMware and Cloudera have entered into a partnership agreement that is meant to help users of Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution, CDH4, to run in the cloud. As part of this announcement, VMware has tested and certified Cloudera’s Enterprise Big Data software to run on vSphere 5.1 and that Cloudera is now part of the VMware Ready and Technical Alliances Partner (TAP) program.

Whenever we’ve dealt with something for a while, our way of thinking about it becomes a habit. Hadoop deals with a lot of data. Currently, the record is 100 petabytes in a Facebook cluster that analyzes log data. Since it was built by the likes of Google and Facebook to deal with such large data volumes and performance, it originally was built to run on bare-metal servers. Since it wasn’t an option from the get-go, the notion that you can’t have that much data running on a move-able virtual machine safely has largely gone unchallenged.

However, as time has gone on, and technology has allowed for persistent storage on the cloud, organizations have started to rethink this paradigm. In fact, several companies are using Hadoop and big data today to gain competitive advantage. And while they are running it on virtualization, they are not moving the data. There are other advantages.

VMware’s Big Data product line marketing manager Joe Russell, spoke with Roberto Zicari this week in an interview on ODBMS.org that helps articulate why Hadoop not only can run on virtual infrastructure using Project Serengeti, but why companies should consider it to save time and make Hadoop more usable. Continue reading →

Announced this morning on the new Pivotal blog, where RabbitMQ now resides, this version includes enhancements to garbage collection, consumption, requeuing, memory use, and dead lettering.

For those on Mac OS X, there is a newly packaged, standalone release of RabbitMQ that doesn’t require a separate Erlang install.

Some key, new capabilities include eager synchronisation of mirror queue slaves, automatic cluster partition healing, and improved statistics (including charts) in the management plugin. There are also many enhancements and bug fixes to the server, Java client, Erlang client, and a number of other plugins, including federation, old-federation, shovel, Web-STOMP, STOMP, and MQTT plugins, as well as the consistent hash exchange.

Pivotal, first announced in December, is a new venture started by VMware and EMC that is focused on Big Data and Cloud Application Platforms. Formally launched as a stand-alone entity today, Pivotal is led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz, who has been working as Chief Strategy Officer at EMC since last August.

In a webinar today, Maritz not only confirmed the new initiative is now a stand-alone business with 1,250 employees from VMware and EMC, but he also surprised listeners with an announcement that General Electric is making a strategic investment of $105 million into Pivotal. GE’s Vice President and Corporate Officer Bill Ruh joined the webinar today and said GE will hold a 10% stake in the new company. CEO Jeff Immelt also joined the call to explain This brings the value of the newly launched Pivotal to $1 billion.

Training is a great way to speed up development, learn how to improve performance and usability for your applications and generally build confidence in your skills. This month, SpringSource is offering java developers a 15% discount code on all VMware trainings including Core Spring, Spring Web, Enterprise Integration, and Hibernate classes.

To secure your 15% discount, be sure to use the promo code springcustomerpromo during your registration process (promo is not available for partners). All of the following qualifying classes for May, 2013 can be found below:

The cloud, mobile applications and big, fast data are fundamentally changing how applications are built and modernized today. To speed this transformation at the enterprise level, Pivotal, the new venture by VMware and EMC, will host a live streaming event on April 24th at 10:00 am Pacific/1:00 pm Eastern with a special announcement and an unveiling of its plans to build “A New Platform for a New Era”.

The Pivotal platform will unite data, application, and cloud fabrics, helping enterprises to develop faster, understand more, and succeed at an even greater scale. It is a platform that makes the consumer grade enterprise a reality.

Paul Maritz, the Pivotal Leadership Team, and special guests will unveil this platform, and make a special announcement during a live streaming event on Wednesday, April 24th at 10:00 am Pacific/1:00 pm Eastern.

Instagram is one of the poster children for social media site successes. Founded in 2010, the photo sharing site now supports upwards of 90 million active photo-sharing users. As with every social media site, part of the fun is that photos and comments appear instantly so your friends can engage while the moment is hot. Recently, at PyCon 2013 last month, Instagram engineer Rick Branson shared how Instagram needed to transform how these photos and comments showed up in feeds as they scaled from a few thousand tasks a day to hundreds of millions.

Rick started off his talk demonstrating how traditional database approaches break, calling them the “naïve approach”. In this approach, when working to display a user feed, the application would directly fetch all the photos that the user followed from a single, monolithic data store, sort them by creation time and then only display the latest 10:

IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE NOW AVAILABLE

The PostgreSQL Project has released an important security update for all supported versions including v9.2.4, v9.1.9, v9.0.13, and v8.4.17. Likewise, VMware has also released updated versions of the vFabric Postgres distribution.